Proposed Metro-North Link Could Wake Up Sleepy Co-op City

It is quiet in Co-op City, the nation’s largest housing cooperative, even though some 50,000 people live there. So quiet that the sound of footsteps crunching on icy sidewalks was louder than the wail of distant police sirens on Friday afternoon. So calm that fewer than a dozen people boarded the express bus, the fastest link to Midtown Manhattan, for its hourlong 2 p.m. trip.

This middle-income development, with 35 high-rises and clusters of townhouses, is isolated from the rest of the northeast Bronx by two expressways and the Hutchinson River. The nearest subway stop is a local bus ride or a 20-minute walk away. With its own shopping center and schools, it is self-contained, so much so that some residents say it has been years since they have been to Manhattan.

A plan is afoot that might shift all that. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, in his State of the State address last week, revived a transportation proposal that has long been discussed: the creation of a new Metro-North rail spur that would link the New Haven line with Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, with stops in Co-op City and three other eastern Bronx communities along the way.

If the spur is ever completed, Metro-North says commuters could travel from Co-op City to Penn Station in 27 minutes, and to Stamford, Conn., in 31 minutes, providing a new link for Bronx workers to employers to the north and the south. It could also start a transformation in Co-op City, which remains, residents said, a bit of a real estate secret: It is a safe, leafy place where a three-bedroom co-op costs $27,000 to buy and less than $1,500 a month in maintenance fees.

Tatyana Markaryan, for example, has lived since 1993 in a 21st-floor two-bedroom apartment with a balcony. She and her family have elected to stay even as many of her fellow Russian immigrants have prospered and bought houses in Westchester County. Her younger daughter attends public school in Co-op City, and her older daughter now goes to Lawrenceville, the selective New Jersey boarding school.

“I really find it to be a great deal for the price compared to other places, and I really don’t know why other people think poorly of this part of the Bronx,” Ms. Markaryan said. From her balcony, she can see the Empire State Building on one side and the bay on the other. “The view is magnificent,” she said. “The addition of the Metro-North would be another plus.”

Yet not everyone in Co-op City is as enthusiastic about the proposed train station, which would be built over existing Amtrak rail tracks near Co-op Section 5, the southernmost part of the 338-acre development. In part, that is because the express bus to Manhattan, which costs $6 each way, is convenient, stopping throughout the development, then at multiple stops along Fifth and Madison Avenues. And Co-op City is so large that the new train station would still be a local bus ride away for many residents.

Commuting patterns have been carved over time by the express bus route and access to the No. 5 and 6 trains, which people are used to. “I don’t know how many people are going to get on that stop; I don’t really see a lot,” Robert Jones, 59, a retired postal worker, said on his way home after a morning in Manhattan.

Because units can come with parking spots, Co-op City also has a car culture more suburban than urban. Sheldon Daniels, 43, for example, drives every evening to his FedEx job on Leroy Street in Lower Manhattan. He may use the new train, he said, but then again, he may not.

Mr. Daniels and his family pay $1,500 a month for maintenance, electricity, gas and parking for their three-bedroom duplex townhouse, which his family inherited. It is a great deal, he said. “I love it. I love Co-op,” he said, expressing an enthusiasm seldom heard in New York real estate circles as he walked with his 2-year-old daughter to make the monthly payment.

Elaine Savlowitz, 85, has a different idea for how the Metropolitan Transportation Authority could use the minimum $1 billion that state officials estimate the train spur would cost. Ms. Savlowitz would rather see the restoration of local bus service that was cut several years ago. The cut placed Bronx landmarks like the New York Botanical Garden and Lehman College out of reach for her, because a trip there now requires a difficult change in buses.

Roughly 12,000 of Co-op City’s residents are over 60, and some, like Ms. Savlowitz, have been there since the development opened 40 years ago. “For the first 30 years I lived here, the botanical gardens were like my backyard,” she said.

Co-op City, managed by RiverBay Corporation, is a Mitchell-Lama development, a form of subsidized affordable housing for middle-income buyers. The sales prices are fixed, based on $4,500 for each room in an apartment, and there are maximum and minimum income requirements for buyers. For a five-room apartment, for example, the income range for a family of four is $35,000 to $116,000 a year.

But while hundreds of people are on waiting lists, the wait can be as little as a year for some size apartments, which is shorter than at some other Mitchell-Lama developments, according to a state website that estimates waits.

State officials say they hope to use federal funds for some of the cost of the train line, arguing that it would create a critically needed transportation redundancy for Metro-North in case of a disaster. The most recent capital plan for the transportation authority included $41 million for planning and designing the line.

Although the full funding for the project has not been secured, Cindy Tolentino, 41, who works at the main post office on Eighth Avenue across from Penn Station, hopes that the state gets it. She now takes the 5:30 a.m. bus from Co-op City to get to work by 7:30 a.m. “It would be wonderful,” she said.

There was also no argument from the teenagers working on laptops at the sleepy Co-op City public library branch last Friday, looking sullenly as if they would rather be anywhere else. “We’re in the middle of nowhere here; it’s boring,” said Brianna Rivera, 17. “Putting a train through Co-op,” said her 17-year-old friend, Glenn Deets, would be “amazing.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Proposed Metro-North Link Could Wake Up Sleepy Co-op City. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe